If Sepp Blatter really is Jesus he wouldn’t have to be re-elected every four years

TOM PECK: Sepp Blatter, lord of all he surveys at Fifa but hardly the Light of the World

Fifa president Sepp Blatter (Getty Images)

C S Lewis famously argued that if you aren’t prepared to accept Jesus was the son of God then you must conclude that he was either a liar or a lunatic.

We deduce then, that it was solely in the interest of narrowing down this theological trilemma still further that a Caribbean football executive chose to liken Fifa’s own immortal deity, Sepp Blatter, to the Saviour of Mankind. The Fifa president would no doubt admit himself he is not the Light of The World. And he is certainly not a lunatic. So what do you have left?

There remains a chance, we admit, that it was merely venal sycophancy and not some learned purpose that caused Osiris Guzman, president of the Football Association of Dominican Republic, to draw comparison between a septuagenarian Swiss lawyer whose name is a joke on every football terrace in the world, and not only Jesus himself but also Moses, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King.

Indeed, he was one of only 10 Caribbean disciples to give unprompted speeches in gushing praise of the “Father of Football” – as Tim Kee of Trinidad & Tobago called him – when the football blazerati of North and Central America met this week in a grand Bahamas hotel to confer their support on president Blatter in the upcoming Fifa presidential election he cannot possibly lose.

It is a joyous coincidence of the calendar, rarer even than a solar eclipse or Scottish World Cup qualification, that Fifa’s election, which occurs on 29 May, should have synchronised with our own rather more parochial affair.

Sports politics geeks are used to watching football’s dubious tail wag the dog. When Nigel Farage levels the same metaphor at the SNP, the implication is that some part of the system is misfiring, that there has been a malfunction. Fifa, on the other hand, is a beast deliberately grotesque by design. When Jamaica, Haiti, Cuba, Panama, Puerto Rico and St Vincent & the Grenadines are set up to wield as much influence over world football as Germany, Spain, France, Italy, England and the Netherlands, once you’ve got a firm grip on the tail, you don’t have to worry what the dog is up to.

In any case, a dog is the wrong metaphor. Were a leading political satirist to tell the Fifa tale through the life of animals, he wouldn’t write a genteel parable set on a farm, but a horror story unfolding high up in the Alpine lair of a madman, his glabrescent head shimmering in the terrifying glare as he surgically conjoins a cabal of entirely complicit African elephants, Arabian camels, Russian bears and Caribbean Pirates. Behold: The Blazered Centipede. See its secret hole, somewhere round the back, where the money goes in. And up at the front, a wrinkled old arse with spectacles on, the excrement pouring out its mouth.

It was not Blatter of Nazareth who made it this way, this perfectly oiled engine primed for nefarious purposes. That was his predecessor, Joao Havelange, but you don’t need a turtle-necked Harvard professor dashing around the Zurich streets to uncover Fifa’s secret bloodline.

In fact, it is not Jesus but King Herod who is the more pertinent analogy. It can’t have escaped Blatter’s attention, as he signs up for another four years as the world’s sporting pantomime villain, that in the now unfavoured (and widening) shape of Michel Platini, he has taken the sword to his heir apparent.

Poor Sepp. At least Jesus didn’t have to suffer the indignity of re-election every four years. The Apostles don’t record how their leader came to be Chairman of Christianity’s first Executive Committee, nobly painted 1,500 years later on the wall of a Milanese monastery by Leonardo da Vinci (and who is now suspected of chucking in a woman for a bit of a laugh, a clever tactic recently cottoned on to by Fifa itself).

One imagines the occasional catering or weather-based miracle was sufficient to keep the Disciples on their toes, and to that end Sepp probably thought he’d done enough when he somehow managed to deliver a World Cup to a country that thinks soccer is probably something you smoke after Friday prayers with a nice mint tea. In fact, it’s just made matters worse.

In the meantime, at least unlike silly old England he doesn’t have to get bogged down with such trivialities as a debate, or a manifesto. He refused the former some time ago, and as for the latter, he has only angrily stated, “My record is my manifesto,” which is fighting talk given that his organisation is about as loved by the non-blazer-wearing football world as the woman selling lucky heather outside Nigel Farage’s local.

So when, some time after 7 May, as whoever it might be walks into 10 Downing Street with Nick Clegg beside them, don’t be sad. There is another election to enjoy, and this one’s got Jesus, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King all rolled into one. Yep, course it has.